The Babylon rite

28

Mercado de las Brujas, Chiclayo, north Peru

The condor stared at her. It was dead, and hanging upside down. Next to it was the dried foetus of a llama, its eyeball poached and screaming in the skinless carcase.

Jess spat the taste of the rough nylon hood from her mouth. The hood now lay crumpled on the dirty floor; it had been whipped away by a lustrously dark, luridly tattooed man, with a necklace of shark’s teeth and an Abercrombie amp; Fitch sweatshirt. The man was barefoot and muttering and smoking a spliff of dark jungle tobacco, and tightening the bonds that strapped Jess to the chair on which she had been forced to sit.

She knew immediately where she had been taken: because they hadn’t gone far, and the environs were distinctive. Evidently, she had been dragged into the witches’ market, a corner of the town market where shamans and curanderos and brujas came from many miles around, to trade potions and spells and malevolent juju. Ironically, the Mercado de las Brujas was where she had been headed. But now she was here as a hostage.

Jess struggled. ‘? Que estoy haciendo aqui? ’ What am I doing here?

The man ignored her, and just kept muttering. ‘ Nqupaykunaq yuyay champi… ’

These words were Quechua. The man in the little stall, shielded from the rest of the market by plastic sheets and curtains, was speaking Quechua. Probably he didn’t even understand Spanish. Nonetheless she tried again. ‘?Por que??Por que me has secuestrado?’ Why have you kidnapped me?

It was pointless. She heard a small voice behind her, in the gloom. Jess caught a glimpse of other dark faces in the background; staring at her and whispering.

The man in the sweatshirt smelled of condor. And dung. And rainforest. And sex. As if he hadn’t washed in several weeks. It was a primal smell of jungle and mountain, Quechua and Inca. He was obviously a curandero, one of the mountain shamans, down from his Andean village to do his weekend business, hawking talismans and voodoo dolls to the local wizards.

Jess tried to pacify her terrors, to rationalize them. She knew these people: the real Peruvians, the country-folk and mountain-dwellers, the descendants of the Moche and the Chavin and the Cham Cham who believed and practised the ancient magic. They were not usually killers. If anything, they were all too inert and passive, ruefully resigned to the terrible forces of nature — drought and El Nino, white men and dictatorships.

But her rationalizations only got her so far. And then they gave out entirely. Jess was terrified.

And now something was happening. The curandero in the Abercrombie sweats had reached into a smelly plastic tank — to pull out a large wriggling lizard, almost a foot long.

The lizard writhed and yawned in his hand. With the air of someone who had done this many times before, the man took a lazy puff on his foul-smelling cigarette, shifted the butt in his mouth, exhaled pungent smoke through clenched yellow teeth, then stuck a knife in the animal. A pitiful, wheezing cry emanated from it. The curandero lifted up the lizard, which was now bleeding copiously from the half-gutted belly.

Hamuy kayman llank anaykita ruway!

The tone was abrupt: it sounded as if he was ordering someone into action. A boy stepped nervously from the shadows, and reached around Jess. She flinched at his touch. The feel of his grimy infant fingers on her tee shirt, under her denim jacket, was chillingly unpleasant. The boy lifted up her T-shirt, exposing her naked stomach.

The curandero hoisted the thrashing lizard over her stomach and dribbled copious warm blood from its riven gut so that the blood fell on her bare skin, like drops of melting red wax from a candle. The urge to clean it off immediately was unbearable.

‘ Para, por favor.?Que estas haciendo? ’ Stop. Stop. What are you doing?

No reply. The shaman had his eyes closed. He circled the dying, writhing lizard, sprinkling its hot reptilian blood on Jess’s arms and thighs now. Then he vigorously squeezed and twisted the creature as if he was squeezing the last drops from a wet rag, flicking tiny drops of darker blood all over her breasts and her belly. At last he flung the dead reptile to the dirty floor.

‘Stop…’

Her voice was weak with fear. The curandero bent down and blew cigarette smoke over her chest and face, talking and muttering as he did, blowing more smoke on the lizard-blood pooled in her navel; then more hot smoke in her face, chanting and smoking, and blowing, his breath soiled with the smell of green soup.

Her attention was diverted to her own legs: Jess gazed down in horror.

The little boy was doing something down there. Rolling up her jeans, to expose her ankles. She gazed in urgent terror as he reached up and dipped his fingers in the blood on her stomach; then used it to draw lines around her ankles, like a surgeon marking the lines of incision.

Were they going to cut off her feet at the ankles?

Jessica screamed as loud as she was able.

The curandero sighed, took a fetid cloth and rammed it in her mouth. Jessica screamed, but silently now, muffled and helpless. The curandero’s boy had finished drawing blood circles on both her ankles. Straining against her bonds, Jess tried to cough out the cloth, but it was no good. They really were going to do it: they were going to cut off her feet, like the mad and terrible Moche.

Lifting a tobacco-stained finger, the curandero ordered the boy back into the shadows. Then he took up the long vicious knife he had used to gut the lizard.

Jessica rocked violently back on the chair, trying to fling herself away, without success. She was stuck here, in this terrible shack, stuck with the painted caiman skulls, the meek little statues of Jesus, the bowls of raw coca paste.

She felt the first touch of the blade on her ankles. A shy and tentative gesture, explorational. Jessica closed her eyes and waited for the driving pain as the metal cut into her skin.

And then her bones.